I've spent a lot of time of the last year wandering around ThoughtWorks, talking
to lots of people on lots of projects. One message that's come home
really firmly to me is the value of rotation.

We practice rotation in lots of ways. One of the most notable is
rotating around countries. We've put in a deliberate program to
encourage people to spend 6-18 months in a different country. Living
a good length of time in a different country does a huge amount to
widen people's perspective of the world. I've benefitted personally
from living both in the UK and USA, even though they are very
similar cultures. This mental expansion is even greater for those
that spend time in somewhere like India, where the cultural
differences are greater.

Geographic rotation presents lots of challanges, particular for
older people with familes. One of the things we need to figure out
is how to make geographic rotation easier for people, so more people
do it. Already there's a notion growing that to prosper in the
company you need to spend a spell or two in a foreign office. But I
wouldn't want this to be compulsory, because there often are genuine
reasons why people can't do it.

My sense is that geographic rotation will be one of our key
techniques to avoid the company dividing into national fiefs. We are
very much of the lean belief that local optimization often gets in the
way of global performance. So we need people to think of the
company's success as a whole rather than the success of the office
they work for.

As well as geographic rotation, we're also increasingly pushing
project rotation. Time and time again I've listened to project teams
talk about how bringing in new people with fresh ideas has
invigorated the team. For those who rotate, there's also the benefit
of more varied work.

One of the biggest difficulties in project
rotation is that clients often don't like to lose known able people
and get someone new and unproven. I quite understand this. With most
consulting companies I would argue hard against allowing the
consulting company to rotate - my mantra was "pick the people not
the company". I came to this view when working for a Big 8 (as it
was in those days) consultancy. The typical tactic was to send in
a strong team for the proposal and then swap them out with a
distinctly inferior team once the contracts were signed. (In one case
a project manager was sold to a client when the company already had
that PM allocated to another project in another
continent. What's worse they pretended to the client that the PM was
still working on the project even when he was thousands of miles
away. Oddly they were suprised when the client was annoyed.) One of
ThoughtWorks's difference is that there's no second rate team - but
it
takes time to clients to learn that this isn't just a marketing
slogan.

Project rotation is particularly vital to help in propagation of
techniques and skills. It's long been my view that knowledge
management and reuse are primarily human issues - not a matter to
technology or process. Rotation is a practice which we've seen to
promote knowledge transfer and reuse, and I think its efficacy is
due to the fact that it addresses the human element.

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